Intellectual Property Law

The Law Office of Craig Small has extensive experience in intellectual property law; specifically IP strategic counseling, copyright law, trademark law and trade secret law. Please contact Mr. Small’s office to setup your free consultation to understand your intellectual property law rights and what options are available to you. The Law Office of Craig Small can help you with any or all of the following:

IP Strategy: The Law Office of Craig Small LLC provides comprehensive advice on intellectual property strategy; including diligence expertise on clearance investigations, legal opinions and IP counseling. An IP Strategy session will determine a comprehensive overview of all applicable IP assets and their pertinence to a wide variety of strategic issues, including determining the scope of protection and potential value of an IP portfolio acquisition, helping to avoid infringement issues with planned product and brand development, determining applicability of a client’s portfolio to products of one or more other companies, and identifying those assets that may be best licensed.

Copyrights: The Law Office of Craig Small, LLC can help prepare your copyright applications, filings, renewals and assignments as well as enforce your copyrights.. We have vast experience in this field. Protection services include regularly assisting clients to secure copyright privileges and ownership of copyright assets, including assignments from third-parties and independent contractors, dealing with employee issues, authorship and joint authorship matters, idea submission and work for hire issues. Protection services also include strategic advice regarding licensing copyrighted works, entertainment properties and software, including counseling clients on open source issues.

Trademarks: The Law Office of Craig Small, LLC can help you with your trademark searches, applications and prosecution. If you are using a word, phrase, logo, symbol, color, or sound to identify your product or service, you have a trademark. "Using" the mark in conjunction with your goods or services is most important for obtaining rights under United States trademark law. Taking the additional step of registering your trademark with the United States Trademark Office confers additional rights and privileges that make it much easier to prove the validity and enforceability of a trademark.

Trade Secrets: The Law Office of Craig Small, LLC can help you with your trade secret policy, development, counseling and audits. Trade secrets may be the most difficult form of intellectual property to both identify and protect. Items as simple as a customer mailing list or as complex as a chemical process can exist as a trade secret under Colorado law. The advantage of keeping an invention as a trade secret rather than patent it lies in the fact that if a trade secret can remain a secret, it lives on indefinitely (e.g., Coca Cola's® formula is over a century old), while a patent last only 20 years from its filing date.